Editor's Note: This week, Jim Shelton and John Easton of the Education Department will provide the question and join in the discussion. Shelton heads the Office of Innovation and Improvement, and Easton leads the department's research branch, the Institute of Education Sciences.

The federal government and private institutions such as graduate schools, foundations, and nonprofit groups spend billions of dollars on promoting educational innovation, developing and designing new programs, supporting research, evaluating programs, and disseminating their findings. But these resources are not organized, prioritized, or leveraged for maximum impact. Innovations are often not scaled because of lack of evidence; research is frequently separated from the problems of practice; and evaluation findings provide little insight into why a particular program succeeded or not. These disconnects demand a new vision, one that binds the work of researchers, evaluators, developers, practitioners, and policymakers and builds a cohesive structure for school reform.

Given this need, what are the essential components of an effective innovation, research, development, and dissemination infrastructure in education? How can we tap into the collective expertise of practitioners when designing and refining new school programs? Finally, what are the capabilities that need to exist at the local, state, and national levels and how should organizations that provide them fit together into a coherent whole? Our ultimate goal is to ensure that all students can benefit from well-designed and thoroughly tested best practices.

-- Jim Shelton and John Easton

How can the Obama administration and Congress put together a winning majority for reauthorization of ESEA? What should change, what should remain more or less the same, and why?

The Education Department is working on finalizing applications for the $4.35 billion Race to the Top Fund, the centerpiece of the Obama administration's education reform agenda. The program, whose goals include turning around low-performing schools, is widely reported to be a blueprint for the administration's plans for the upcoming reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act.

In a recent article for Education Next, expert Andy Smarick made a compelling case against the "turnaround" strategy. "Once persistently low performing, the majority of schools will remain low performing despite being acted upon in innumerable ways," Smarick wrote. He argued that poorly performing schools should be closed.

Is the turnaround strategy fundamentally flawed? Is the Race to the Top Fund throwing billions of dollars down the drain?

Even with federal stimulus dollars, which won't last forever, many schools are struggling financially and must seek alternative solutions. Should public-private partnerships be formed to shore up gaps in school budgets? Does this pose ethical concerns?

Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, have called for an overhaul to our nation's teacher evaluation systems.

How should teacher effectiveness be assessed? What role should student performance and standardized testing have in this equation?